The Gede's comedy is structural rather than incidental. On 2 November the cemeteries are full, the recently bereaved are present, and the lwa of death arrive to make obscene jokes at their expense, to mock the priest, to demand money from the well-dressed, and to perform explicit dances in front of everyone. Nobody is exempt. The connection between Haiti's mortality — historically among the worst in the hemisphere, and catastrophically so in 2010 — and the character of its death spirits is drawn by Haitians themselves, who will say that a people who could not survive taking death solemnly made it funny instead. The Gede are also the lwa most often petitioned for a sick child, which is the same point from the other direction: the spirits who own death are the ones with the authority to release someone from it.